For all my complaining that it will eventually lead to the downfall of our society, I have to admit that Facebook can be a pretty cool place. Just yesterday, I logged on and did a quick stroll down my news feed where I was promptly wished a Happy Hump Day by Axl Rose – my favorite singer, treated to a sneak peak of a poster for next season’s Southland- one of my new favorite shows and saw a clip of Clue- one of my favorite movies. It was a pop culture extravaganza and it was all collected and presented to me in a nice neat stream of content – and I didn’t have to do a thing! Now, I’m not completely forgiving Facebook for the fact that it lets me check my ex-boyfriend’s page every once in a while – something I hate myself for doing but can’t seem to stop – but I do think the ease in which information is distributed is pretty awesome.

Never in a million years could the minds who created futuristic movies and TV shows in the 80s and 90s have imagined something like Facebook. The world was on the verge of discovering and exploring the internet and the term social media platform hadn’t exactly been coined. Funny to think about how common that term is now. Back then, cell phones were gigantic (I’ll always remember the phone Zack Morris used on Saved By the Bell, computers took up the size of an entire room (remember War Games?) and video games were, sorry Atari, elementary. But the creative minds behind some of the classic movies and TV shows from our past gave it their best shot and came up with some pretty cool things they assumed made sense in a 21st century world. Here are a few of my favorites.

I’ve called out theBack to the Futuretrilogy before in my blog posts as I am a true fan. In the second installment, which mostly took place in the year 2012 (ha) I loved the creativity that went into the hover boards, the automatic clothes drying button and the computerized voice that welcomed each individual family member back home. But my favorite futuristic concept was definitely the hydratable pizza. A pizza pie the size of a silver dollar was placed in the GE Hydrator and once “hydratred” for 3 seconds, instantly became an extra-large, piping hot pizza pie, perfect for the whole family. So creative!

“The Jetsons” was a fan favorite TV show in the 80s (having had a successful run in the 60s) about a family living in the year 2062. They featured a lot of typical advancements – Rosie the maid was a robot, George commuted to work in a flying saucer like aerocar and all the stairs in the Jetson home resembled airport moving walkways. But again, my favorite concept centers around meal time and in Orbit City, meals came in the form of pills, making the consumption of an entire meal possible in seconds. How convenient!

For some strange reason, I really like the movie Demolition Man. Policeman Sylvester Stallone and criminal Wesley Snipes are cryogenically frozen in the year 1996 only to become unfrozen well into the 21st century. As their game of cat and mouse unfolds, the characters are brought up to speed on what they missed, mainly that Arnold Schwarzenegger had been president, salt had been declared unhealthy thus illegal and the only legal form of sexual intercourse was conducted via the use of computers. What a world. But my favorite concept from these creative minds has to be the citywide electronic system that penalized you, via a system of credits, for cursing in public. How great would that be!?